In the first volume of his memoirs, In Time of Trouble, Claude Cockburn described his introduction to The Times of the 1930s, on a visit to its foreign desk. There he found one sub-editor reciting Plato’s Phaedo from memory, while another translated it into Chinese: they had a bet it could not be done without loss of nuance. Another sub-editor, a grammarian of Polynesian previously employed as a professor of Chinese metaphysics at the University of Tokyo, spent the entire evening over a two-line item concerning the Duke of Gloucester’s arrival in Kuala Lumpur. ‘There are,’ he explained to Cockburn, ‘eleven correct ways of spelling Kuala Lumpur, and it is difficult to decide which should receive the, as it were, imprimatur of The Times.’
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